Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 451.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly.

Well, hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy New Year. Welcome to August 2026. Here we go. We are ready for a brand new school year. Are you ready? Are you already in session? I’m thinking about all of you. I’m sending out so much love, so much enthusiasm, so much excitement for this new year. I want you to know that this is the perfect time to be thinking about empowered routines for the year.

So, it’s that time of year. We’re starting off fresh, kicking off school. EPC is starting. So for those of you who are interested in EPC, please click the link in the show notes, get registered. We are starting in September. We are so ready for you. We want you to be there. We want your talent, your wisdom, your strengths, your expertise in the room with us at the table sharing, collaborating, connecting, networking, problem-solving, supporting, creating, innovating. This is what we’re doing here in the Empowered Principal Collaborative. It’s the most loving, supportive group that you can find on the planet for school leaders. I really, deeply, truly believe that. So join us in EPC. This is the time because we are starting. We want you there. Okay.

Let’s talk about empowered routines. So, we have routines in our life, whether we recognize them and acknowledge them or not, whether we are aware of them or not, whether we are intentional with our routines or not. So, during the summer, you had a certain routine, and that routine looks very different than the school year for most people. But we can be a little more flexible in maybe our sleep schedule or our travel schedule, even our eating schedule for that matter, right? We have different schedules in the summer, but now we’re back getting into a routine. And this is the time of year to be conscious of the routines that you have, to be intentional about the routines you want to create. And I would like to offer empowered routines for you to consider and contemplate for you personally, what you believe to be empowered routines for you.

So, what’s the beauty of having a routine? We all have them. So why do we have them as humans? The way that I see routines is that they automate our decisions and actions. They’re things that we want to just do on autopilot that help us achieve the lifestyle we want, the goals that we have, the experiences we want, without having to re-decide every single day. So when you wake up in the morning, and morning routines are actually really essential, and they’re important. We’re going to talk about them in this podcast.

Your morning routine is essential because it starts your day. It determines your energy, whether or not you feel momentum, you feel excited. That energy about how you feel about your day, the life that you’re going to live today in this moment, starts with your morning routine. So morning routines, and routines in general, they automate our actions. So we don’t have to re-decide every morning. You don’t wake up and decide every morning, “Am I going to brush my teeth?” “Am I going to get dressed?” “Am I going to do my hair and makeup or take a shower?” We automate those routines in the morning because we want to be clean, we want to be healthy, we want healthy teeth, we want to go to school dressed in our professional clothing, not our jammies. And so, we will automate a routine in the morning.

So, we use routines and we leverage them because they help us create our identity. Routines are just actions that we take on a regular basis. So the things you do on a regular basis, they determine your identity. They determine how you feel, they determine what you accomplish, and how you accomplish them. Because as you know, there’s no one right way to do a morning routine or any routine. There’s just the way that works for you.

So, you do have a routine, and I’m using the morning routine as an example. You have a morning routine whether you are conscious of it or not, whether you think about it or not, and whether you’re intentional about it or not. So, it’s not the “what” in the routine. It’s not so much about what you do in the morning. You know what to do. Most of us have a pretty similar routine.

Now, some of us might wake up and meditate the first thing or journal the first thing or do gratitudes the first thing. Other people might just grab their phone and start scrolling or reading the news or checking the email to see if there’s enough subs for the day. Some people get up out of bed and take a walk or stretch or go to a yoga class. Other people get up and prepare the lunches and get the kids things all ready. There’s a routine in everybody’s home and it looks a little different, but the routines are in place so that what you want to accomplish gets accomplished without having cognitive dissonance and arguments within your brain internally every single day. Should I brush my teeth? Should I not brush my teeth? Should I pack the kids’ lunches? No, I don’t feel like packing the kids’ lunches. Do I need to get dressed today or do I not? We don’t do that. We just do. Okay?

So, this is about what we want to create for our routines. So often times, and I want to use the example of like being healthier, fit because it’s something so relatable. We know what to do. If we want to lose weight, we know eat less, move more. Or eat certain kinds of foods that work for our body that help us to lose the weight. We know that. It’s not the what. How do I do this? How do I start this routine or how do I create a routine? It isn’t the what. We know how to do it. And even for you principals out there who are brand new, you don’t know what you’re doing.

So even if you don’t know the what. And look, do we actually really know the what? When we’re thinking about my goal, I want to build a routine that the outcome of that routine is, you know, increased student success, increased teacher success. My outcome that I desire is a thriving, successful school, academically, professionally, personally, socially. I want a healthy culture. I want these things for my school. What is the routine? We might not know. Oh, do this, do that.

But even when we don’t know exactly how to create a desired outcome and what exact steps we need to do, especially if you’ve never done the job before, none of us really know exactly how to raise test scores or what support a student or a teacher might need to create successful outcomes of their own. But we do know some possibilities. We can guess, we can test our theory, even when we don’t know. So you can test out a routine, see if it empowers you, see if it empowers others, see if it works, try it. If the routine doesn’t feel good or it’s not creating the outcomes, adjust. You don’t have to get exactly know the how.

But a lot of times, we know. We’ll say things like, “I know what to do. I know I should be doing this or that.” So the first step in empowered routines for this school year is to know what you want. What outcomes do you want to create? What experiences do you want to have? How do you want to feel as a principal this year? And why? So what do you want and why? How do you want to create it and why? How do you want to feel and why? Make sure you know the why.

Here’s why. It anchors you. It anchors in the routine. I brush my teeth because I want a clean mouth, fresh breath, and healthy gums. It’s a non-negotiable. I just do it. It’s who I am. It’s my identity. I’m a person who brushes their teeth every single day. I floss, rinse, brush, I do all the things. Water pick, whatever you have. We do that because we desire the outcome. It becomes a non-negotiable and we get results from it. We go to the dentist, we don’t have cavities, or we go to the dentist and they clean and tell us good job. Keep it up. We want that. We don’t want to lose our teeth. We don’t want gum disease. We want a healthy mouth, okay?

Sometimes we know what to do, sometimes we don’t, but we can test the theory. If you want something but you’re not sure what, you can anchor yourself in the why. This is why I want it, so I’m willing to figure out a routine that helps me get what I want. If I want to lose five pounds, I, you know, let myself have fun this summer, I gained five pounds, I want to lose it during the school year. I’m going to meal prep. That’s going to be my theory. I’m going to test my theory. I’m going to meal prep on the weekend, have everything ready, put it in containers, and off I go. I’ll test that theory. If that doesn’t work, maybe I need to walk before or after school, or you test the theory and see what works for your body.

But that is the easy part when it comes to building empowered routines, knowing what you want and why you want it. Most of us know what we want and why we want it. And if you don’t, start there. What makes empowered routines challenging are the very convincing reasons that our mind will provide us as to why we cannot execute that routine, why we can’t put it into play and make it become a habit, make it become an identity. It’s just who we are. It’s non-negotiable. It’s just what we do. We don’t even think about it. We just do it. Okay?

What makes empowered routines difficult to implement and to execute? Our brain has the motivational triad going on that works against us. It wants us to seek out pleasure, avoid pain, make things as easy as possible. When your brain wants those three things and you’re asking it to do something that’s a little bit uncomfortable or a little bit different, or it requires some effort or some thinking power, your brain will be like, “Nah, I don’t feel like that. I’m kind of tired. I don’t have time for that. That’s not going to work for me,” right? It says things like, “Oh, we couldn’t get into classrooms today. I had a discipline issue.” Feels very reasonable, feels very justified, and maybe it was, but it is a reason and it’s an excuse as to why you didn’t get into classrooms. I know that feels harsh. Just stick with me on this.

Or somebody will say to me, they’re trying to get home to their family, but they keep going home late and then their spouse is upset and the kids, you miss this and that, or the kids are upset, and it’s a big mess, but you just can’t seem to get yourself out of the office. They’ll say, “I couldn’t go home on time. There was a meeting last minute. I had to catch up on paperwork. I hadn’t checked emails all day. I had to get this thing turned in.” There’s always a reason as to why they can’t implement the new empowered routine, the routine that says, “I manage my time, I determine when I work, when I go home, and I ensure that I get my priorities taken care of so that I can be home with my family because that is a priority for me.” The brain is very convincing, you guys. “Can’t make it to yoga, too tired after work. I just can’t do it. Or I can’t get up and walk in the morning, it’s too early.”

Most of the time, we know what we need to do. We know the steps if we want a certain goal. Let’s say we want to get into classrooms, and because we believe that being in classrooms, being present, connecting with kids, connecting with teachers, you want to be in there. You want to see what’s going on. You want to be in the learning environment so that you can be the instructional leader that you are passionate about being. We know what we need to do. What we don’t know how to do when it comes to empowered routines and implementing them is how to coach ourselves through all of the reasons and the excuses and the rationales that our brain will offer us in the moment.

And what I have found to be true for myself is that it is much more difficult to honor a routine that you wish to establish when your brain starts telling you, “It’s okay, you don’t need to do it now. Do it tomorrow.” Or, “You know, you have to get it done right now. There’s no time for going home on time.” To either delay work and you’ll do it tomorrow and not do the routine because you’re too tired or there’s not enough time or something came up and there’s all these reasons, or you do all of the work because you’re afraid to not do the work and so you’re constantly overworking, overexerting, and not living a life outside of school leadership.

But it’s very difficult to honor the routine in the moment because you have feelings about it. You’re either going to be too tired, too exhausted, not have the energy, or you’re going to be so afraid if you don’t get it done or you don’t check the email or you go home on time, you’re going to be deemed a terrible principal and you’re going to lose your job. So, my little secret here, my little hack, is to make the decisions about your routine in advance. Decide ahead of time. This is when I’m going into classrooms. Put it on the calendar. Mark it as a sacred hour on your calendar. I’m going into classrooms. Don’t call me unless there’s life and limb happening, right? Like, if there’s a 911 or potential loss of life, then of course, interrupt me. Otherwise, I’m prioritizing this. It’s my new routine. It’s who I am as a principal. We don’t do that.

If you make these decisions in advance, it’s much easier when your brain’s like, “Oh, this thing, I got to check the email.” “Nope, we’re doing this.” The problem is when the excuses come in, because they will, there’s no stopping it. And I don’t care how long you’ve been a principal, our brain continues to offer the excuses and the reasons why we don’t want to honor the empowered routines we have set into place or that we want to set in place. But when you make the decision in advance, your brain does have less chatter. There’s just less conversation around it in your mind. It won’t extinguish the chatter, but it reduces it. It turns the volume down.

Let me provide a concrete example. I used to struggle in the morning. I would wake up really early and I didn’t want to be loud, but I would be tired, of course. And I just couldn’t decide what I wanted to wear. And I would sit and stare at my closet and then I try something on. I don’t feel like this. I don’t feel like that. I just don’t want to do this. I don’t know what to wear. And I would waste time trying to make a decision. I hated that feeling. It didn’t feel good in the morning. I just was always felt like I was running late.

And so what I ended up doing was on Sunday, I would go in to my bedroom and I would get in my closet and I would pick out five outfits. Monday was my school colors day, so I would put out all of my leopard, Monolama leopard sweatshirt, polo, whatever I was wearing for the day. That was Monday. Tuesdays, I knew I had leadership team meeting, so I wore something professional because I had to go to the district office meetings. You know, Wednesday was staff meeting day. Thursdays was minimum day. Fridays was Fridays, right? So a little more casual on Fridays. We had a lot of, you know, usually sneakers and a blazer or something comfortable but casual because I knew I’d be running around, okay?

So, I started just thinking about, I already know what’s coming up for my week. And so I knew the meetings I had, I knew the professionalism, and I did keep a pair of like extra pair of shoes, extra blazer. So if I had to dress up, or I also had a pair of flats if I had to run around and be more comfortable for emergency stuff. But I kind of knew what was coming for the week. And so I made myself decide on Sunday, this is what my outfits are for the week. I hung them in the bathroom for the week. They were just there and I didn’t have to think about it. Monday’s was in front, Friday’s was in back. Just pulled it off and done. I had a like a rack, a hook thing that I put all of my outfits on and it just was there, wasn’t in the way, made it work. You can hang it anywhere. It doesn’t have to be in your bathroom, but that for me, that’s what worked.

But then I just went in and I knew to get ready, that’s what I was wearing for the day. No more chatter, didn’t argue. Now, did my brain be like, “Oh, I don’t feel like that today. I want to wear other things?” Sometimes, yes. But in that moment, what was most important is that I honored the decision I had already made for myself. Just wear this outfit. Unless there was a stain or something was wrong with it, but we want to honor the decisions we make in advance when it comes to empowered routines because that is how we build up our integrity. That’s how we build up trust in ourselves. Choosing in advance helped me not to have to make the decision in the morning when I wasn’t fully awake. And even then, my brain would still be like, “I don’t want to wear that today. I want something cozier, more comfortable, or I don’t feel perky today. I want that color. I want to wear a different color.”

So, I could always allow myself to change if I wanted to. That’s not the point. I could allow that. But when I do that, I erode my trust and faith in myself. I diminish my self-discipline. I dilute the strength of my word to myself, of my own integrity, of honoring what I said I would do, the promise I made to myself. Now, is a different outfit life or death? Absolutely not. But if I can’t do this with small things, small routines, if I can’t honor them and build up my self-discipline and my self-trust and my self-integrity and my faith in myself and honoring my word and sticking to that promise to myself for the little things like an outfit, I’m definitely going to allow my brain to talk me out of the big things, the more uncomfortable things, the things that are challenging and scary and overwhelming. I’m for sure going to avoid those things and keep changing my mind.

So empowered routines are about what you want, why you want them, and the self-coaching that is required to honor them. This is the gift of coaching, learning the skill of self-coaching. You’re not going to have a coach in your pocket. I can’t come with you every second of the day and be like, “Okay, let’s coach on this.” You’ve got to learn to do it yourself. That’s what EPC teaches you. Self-coaching teaches you how to recognize your current routines, your brain’s typical excuses for those routines, and how you react to those excuses so that you can learn how to self-coach and honor. And look, if a routine isn’t working, you of course can renegotiate that routine, but it comes from a place of what you want, why you want it, and what you believe is the best routine to get you there.

So be aware of your routines. Create some awareness. Create consciousness around your current routines. This is the perfect time to do it because it’s the beginning of the year and decide this is what I want. This is why I want it. This is who I need to be to do it. And I want to learn how to self-coach myself, to empower myself, to rely on me, for me, for my best interest, for my empowered routines. You are worthy of this. You deserve this. It is a skill that every human on the planet deserves to learn is the skill of self-coaching.

So, I’m inviting you in before the doors close. We’re starting in September. Join us for the Empowered Principal Collaborative. If you prefer one-on-one coaching, schedule a consult call. There’s an individual consult call link in the notes and we can talk about it and decide if one-on-one’s the best fit or if EPC is the best fit. But we’d love to have you in the Empowered Principal Collaborative. Have a beautiful day, my fellow leaders, and I will talk with you next week. Take care.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Angela Kelly: Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 449. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to today’s episode. I have a very good friend and colleague of mine here on the podcast. Her name is, I call her Dr. Roseann, Roseann Capanna-Hodge. She is an expert in regulation, nervous regulation. We’re going to talk about it. She has just dropped a new book called The Dysregulated Kid, which I know all of you are interested in hearing about.

We’re here as leaders. We’re here as teachers, we’re here as students, and so I’m going to let Roseann tell you a little bit about herself, her background, and her new book because it is fantastic. It’s something we need to be talking about on the regular here in education for ourselves and for our students. So Roseann, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Well, thank you for that beautiful introduction. I’m grateful to have the privilege of knowing you, and this is my second time on. So…

Angela Kelly: It is. That’s right. 

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: I’m glad. And as a certified school psychologist, I know what it’s like to be boots on the ground in a school, and it is a different time, and we are constantly evolving, and people at every level in a school, right from the custodian to the superintendent have a lot on their shoulders, you know? And my book is called The Dysregulated Kid because for 30 years, I’ve been watching this dysregulation crisis happen. 

But for 30 years, I have been helping the most dysregulated kids and families regulate their nervous systems, which means they can pay attention better, they can process better, they’re happier, they have less mental health issues and symptoms. So I really wanted to take the science, as I always do, and make it so ridiculously easy that anybody could regulate themselves, from the teacher who’s got a classroom full of kids that are struggling to the mom and dad, to the grandma, to anybody. 

This is really a book about what are simple ways that every day I can do little things to bring my nervous system back into balance and really, why is it so important? You know, because we are moving to this place of constant clinical diagnosis and people having strife and being unhappy and struggling with focus and all these things that happen when the nervous system dysregulates. And yet we’re making regulation feel like it’s unattainable and so hard. And I’m here to tell you, absolutely not, that if the things that I did with the most dysregulated kids with serious clinical issues, if they worked when people did it, it can work for anybody.

Angela Kelly: Yes. I love this approach because I know that for the last 30 years you have been working in a clinical setting with students get referred for behavioral or academic concerns. They go through 504 and people are looking for them to get diagnosed for an IEP to qualify for an individualized education plan. 

And one of my philosophies in these meetings was, can we not just do the strategies that we’re waiting for the strategy until they get the diagnosis versus just like, let’s try the strategy first and see if we can just circumvent this whole process of getting them labeled. Let’s just do it now in the classrooms and see what happens versus having them go through this process of getting labeled and getting qualified and then giving them these strategies. It sounds like that’s what I hear you saying as well.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Well, that’s amazing. And where were you in all my school meetings? Actually, I did have some amazing school meetings. It’s just sometimes when you’re in these rooms and you’re in hearings and things like that, it didn’t always go well. But why wouldn’t we want to do more for everybody? 

You know, when I used to go into a school, whether it was a private school or a public school, I would be going in for one kid, and I would go to the teacher and say, let’s do this for the whole classroom. Like everybody will benefit and you will feel the benefit. And so then I would have teachers who would get so excited, administrators like, of course. And every time it made things better. And we shouldn’t wait. And guess what? We now, right, what is it? By 2031, one in 27 births of male and female will be an autistic child.

And it is, I believe it’s one in 27 males already. So we now have just about in every classroom in America, we’re moving to having an autistic student. That’s just one form of neurodivergence, right? That’s a nervous system that’s more sensitive to their environment, going to require these things. Why wouldn’t we do this for everybody? Because we often think nervous system dysregulation, which is really difficulty shifting your nervous system between stress and calm. We’re supposed to be able to moderate stress. Every day we have stressors. You and I were talking about some of the personal stressors we were catching up.

And even talking about it gets you a little, gets your nervous system a little activated. But that’s normal. In a healthy nervous system, it goes from calm, parasympathetic, then a stressor happens and it moves into a sympathetic dominant. But a normal system will say, perceive threat, danger is over, come back down. What’s happening is I talk about the nervous system as a stress cup, Angela, and what happens when a cup is, you put too much in a cup. 

So the nervous system is the same thing. It does not have unlimited capacity, and in our modern life, we just keep adding stressors, right? I’m going to short change sleep. I’m going to stretch myself and take two AP classes and the rest all honors classes. I’m going to, I don’t know, I had a fight with my boyfriend, my mom and I yelled, whatever. All these things sort of happen. And then we have all these people walking around going, you know, I can’t pay attention. I have anxious thoughts. I’m so snappy at everybody. 

And we then think, well, is it anxiety? Is it this? Maybe it is. I don’t know that. But our go-to should be like, we’ve got to regulate. And these are all strategies that are accessible regardless if you have a trauma background or a clinical diagnosis or your age. These are all free, accessible things because what was important to me having done clinic work, not everybody could get to me. Not everybody could afford me. And hello, I’m one person. I was one person. And you know, I no longer do clinical work. I’m just on this mission to really provide the antidote to this crisis. And hello, it’s really simple. It’s not so hard. We got to stop overthinking and start doing.

Angela Kelly: Mhm. Mhm. Say more about that because I think the listeners out here, they’re really curious. They probably heard about nervous system regulation, dysregulation. That language is becoming more mainstream as well as like vagus nerve. Like I’ve heard a lot of conversation in social media presence with the vagus nerve. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Sure. I mean, I mentioned our stress response system, which is our ANS, which is our autonomic nervous system, and its job is to mitigate and handle stress as you do things. So my son called me earlier and I don’t like to talk to him when he’s in the car, but all of a sudden I hear him go, holy cow. And I’m like, is everything all right? And he said somebody came into his lane. So he got, he got himself excited, and then I was like, okay, take a, I could hear him breathing. I was like, oh, I’m so glad you breathed through that.

And then I just said, that happened to me twice yesterday, Max. That’s why we can’t be on the phone. He’s like, I know. I said, I love you, goodbye, you know, and he brought himself down because he works, he has to work real hard, my Max. My Max is the dysregulated kid. He’s my opening story. There’s lots of other kids in there and success stories of people who did these things. 

But when we talk about that autonomic response, we talk and the vagus nerve. So our vagus nerve is what connects our gut to our brain. And so we have to start thinking about our body as a whole body system. And when we think about mental health, we really only think about the brain. We only think about neurotransmitters. And that’s because our diagnostic and statistical manual, what we use to diagnose people, unfortunately very much aligns with a pharmacological intervention. It doesn’t align with, let’s back it up. Let’s start looking at behavior as signs of the nervous system being under or overstimulated. That’s a huge reframe. 

So instead of saying, why is this kid doing this, you say, what is the nervous system showing that this kid needs, right? Or even this classroom. When I think about, I have this great story in my book, and I have a whole bonus chapter just for schools in this book because again, I’ve been there. But I remember going to this class, and it was the first time I had been in a school where there was a kindergarten. So I was there on the first day, Ang.

Angela Kelly: It’s the best. And you know I taught kindergarten for 15 years.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: You know exactly. So it was an inner-city school, so there were kids that had never set foot in a school. And there was, the school district had at the time 47 languages. So there was all kinds of things going on. And there was a teacher who was like grounding mother earth. And I walk in the classroom, there was like an aide guarding the door. There’s a kid that’s like trying to get out, you know, it was like full-on chaos, but not really because the teacher was like, I’m going to be the calm. And she just became the calm. 

And I remember being like, this is a masterclass in how much your regulation impacts everybody else. So when we’re talking about the nervous system and all of these things, vagus nerve, vagus stimulator, gut brain connection, these are all really important things. And our brain does connect to our gut, and stress impacts every single system in the body, your immune system, your hormone system, your gut, your neurotransmitters. 

So we’re often trying to go to these other things to do an intervention. And I’m not saying they’re not important. What I’m saying is if we don’t regulate first, nothing sticks. And so it’s part of this crisis that we’re seeing in that interventions are not working. How many times is a school psychologist that I say, you know, hey, listen, I really think you should go to therapy. Here’s why. And the parent would be like, we already did that. It didn’t work.

To finish that idea, right, we have these different systems and nothing is going to stick treatment wise. Like I said, somebody says, you know, I want to do therapy and they say it doesn’t work or I try this. It’s because the nervous system is too activated to accept that treatment. And the way biology works is your frontal lobes go offline as soon as you activate in a sympathetic dominant state. So what does that look like in a class? A bunch of ADD kids. 

And if you’ve ever watched a kid who experienced trauma or a kid who’s anxious or somebody who’s got OCD, they don’t look so different from kids with biological ADHD behaviorally. Their brains look very different because I did, you know, over 10,000 QEEG brain maps, which are basically brain scans. So we have to move beyond what we thought, and we have to start bringing these very practical things into the classroom, into homes because we think about these big interventions and parents are choking. They can’t do these things. So we need to make things much more simple. And that is what I did, not just in this book, but in all of my work.

Angela Kelly: That’s incredible. It’s interesting because in school, like I work with the school leadership side and they’re noticing the same thing in the adults in the room. Like, so the adults on campus, working with families, community members, in addition to children, and people feel like they are at a loss. They’re not sure what to do because you can only get so many kids through the IEP system, right? Where you’re qualifying them for special education. 

Only so many kids, one will qualify. Two, you can only pump through so many administrations and so many administering of these exams and these tests to determine qualification, which is why I said like, why, why not just start what we think is best practice for these students and go there and see if we can help from the onset. And then the kids who aren’t regulating at that point, we can, we can provide additional supports. 

So in the work that you’re doing now, and you’re seeing this, you know, you actually mentioned it as a crisis, which I believe educators would agree that this, we’re at a crisis level and teachers are feeling ill-equipped, school leaders are feeling ill-equipped. What are some, you said making it easy. They’re probably clapping right now as they’re listening to this. What are some things that you can recommend that they start doing that is very tangible, very hands-on, and something that’s very simple to start incorporating into the campus, the classroom, students and staff?

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Well, I think when it comes to schools, being that I definitely have worked in multiple schools, I feel that what happens is we have trends in school system, right? Whether it’s reading or math or social emotional learning, but what does really help and makes things a lot easier because schools, right, have a lot of pressure on them. They’re asked to do everything that isn’t being done at home. And let’s be honest, again, parents are struggling. We know this, right? And so educators are in a unique position because they have a lot more training around how kids, how they can shape kids’ behavior by what they do and say. 

And so we’re trying to transfer that knowledge to parents who, who may or may not be receptive to it. I feel like a lot of parents really are receptive to it. But one of the things that really works is shared language, right? So when schools start using things, the best way to amplify this is sharing the language. What systems could come into place? So I created shared language. So one of the things that I talk about is something called CALMS, C-A-L-M-S. It’s just a simple acronym. There’s nothing in there that costs any money. And the C is about co-regulating. 

So the first step in everything is to get the adult to regulate, as we talked about. So that’s the teacher, that’s the principal, that’s the parent. So the question becomes, how do we do that? You know, the other, the other parts, A is avoiding personalizing, L is looking for root causes, M is modeling the skills you want, and S is to support and reinforce because we as educators know, kids need a lot of reinforcement. I don’t think any parents do that, right? They don’t understand that. Who knew? You had to reinforce so much. You think you just say it one time. And we remember our own things, we think we only were told one time. It’s not true.

Angela Kelly: Right. Because our parents were like, don’t make me have to tell you twice.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Yeah, I know. How about, don’t make me tell you it again. So when we back up, the most important part is getting everybody to regulate. And so how can we do that? How can we have conversations? Like I try to think of every single thing, Angela, in this book, like there’s a book club guide here. There’s all kinds of ways for people to bring this in. I mean, certainly they can bring me in. But like we’re talking about global impact here. Like where can we get things going? 

But the language and demonstrating how to regulate within a classroom, just like when we have a kid with sensory issues, we start bringing sensory techniques in the classroom. Guess what? Everybody benefits. What can we do in the classroom? Can it be breath? Can it just be breath work that becomes part of the curriculum? We know breath work, hello, it’s free, and it’s the quickest way to pull your body into an autonomic nervous system. 

And I know some of the adults who are here listening might say, oh, I hate breath work or it doesn’t work. Well, I’m going to tell you that if you hate breath work, pretty much guarantee that you are somebody who’s dysregulated and your stress cup is full. And I want people to reframe dysregulation because we often think that what stresses our nervous system always has to be something bad. Your nervous system knows no difference between good and bad stress.

Angela Kelly: That’s interesting.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Yep. So we always are coming through our thinking brain. That’s not what happens in the autonomic nervous system. It decides what is perceived as stress, right? So certainly if something bad happens like, you know, you did get hit by a car or God forbid…

Angela Kelly: Like a trauma. Yeah.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Trauma, you know, then yes, it’s going to feel awful. But when it comes to filling up your stress cup, those things just fill up. So I got to the bus, but I had to run there. Okay, that’s a stressor. I had to study for a test. I got an A, that’s a stressor. I studied for a test and I got a D, that’s a stressor. It just keeps going, going. What I think we’re doing in our modern society, we are not doing the things to regulate ourselves. We certainly don’t have downtime, and I don’t want to blame technology, but technology is part of this problem. There’s no powering down, and the nervous system needs you to power down in order to regulate. There has to be moments of calm. 

And yes, would be great to take breaks from technology, but there also are other ways, right, including breath work and somatic and different exercises and all these different things. We need to pull the hum of this crisis down. And you know, what every school can do to bring parents in as part of this conversation through the PTA, through partnering with religious institutions, all the ways that they get out information. Schools are the hub of a community. They are the lifeblood, and I know there’s a lot on their plate, but if we keep putting interventions that don’t start with the nervous system, it’s like mopping the floor with a wet mop that we haven’t rung.

Like, it’s moving things around, but. And so when I would do this work, every year, Angela, in the summertime, I would get a lot of extra kids, you know, kids that were really struggling. And so every September, I would get the calls, and the parents would go, the school called and wanted to know what medication my kid. And I was like, did you tell them what we did? Did you tell them we regulated the nervous system? And they were like, yes. And, you know, I would have all these regulated kids, like bees, you know, going out. And then there would be teachers that would just call me and bring their own kids in, you know, and stuff because they just couldn’t believe what they were seeing. 

And so that’s the power of regulation, but it doesn’t happen in isolation. We can’t just regulate a child and expect a child to go back home. However, we can make their brain more available for learning and processing at the school day. I’m not a Pollyanna here. You have educators leading schools in every facet of America, inner city components, you know, places where there’s food deserts, you know, places where there has been trauma at the schools. 

And I’ve worked, you know, as a former provider, I was one of nine approved providers for Sandy Hook. I worked with 9/11 survivors. I understand trauma. What did I do every single time when I had a trauma victim, regardless of what the trauma was, regardless of the age, is I regulated their nervous system. I didn’t do anything else until they were regulated enough to do some kind of therapy because we know, again, the brain isn’t going to process that.

So that’s part of why we’re in such a stuck place because this is that missing ingredient in the sauce that makes the beautiful sauce. Like, you go to somebody’s house and you’re like, where did, what’s that sauce? What’s that? And you try to give somebody the recipe and they’re just not doing it right. This is the part that makes everything else work better.

Angela Kelly: That’s beautiful. And I want to reiterate what Rosanne just said, which was kids are not available for therapy, aka, they’re also not available for learning if they’re dysregulated. That’s true with adults, it’s true with students. So bringing in regulation techniques, one, it’s a win-win, win for teacher, win for students, and that helps learning. So that’s one thing I think we want to really drive home here. Children don’t have to be labeled or they don’t have to be even medically labeled or labeled academically as having some kind of a learning disability or a behavior disability, some kind of a disability in order to then provide these techniques. They are free and available to everyone. 

And when you learn them, all students can access them to the level at which they need them. You mentioned something about medication. Now, many, many IEPs have I sat in, and many times teachers would come in and say, we’ve tried everything, we need to bring up the topic of medication. These kids need to be medicated, right? Not every teacher, but some teachers. What would your response be to somebody who wants to push the medication before they’ve tried the regulation techniques that you’re suggesting in your book?

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Yeah, well, first of all, under federal law, we’re not allowed to suggest medication. We can only suggest, yes, so we can only suggest that they visit their physician or go to a psychiatrist. And even that is controversial because then a parent can come back to you and ask for the district to pay for that. FYI, that’s the law.

Angela Kelly: Yes. 

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Right? 

Angela Kelly: Definitely, as a school leader, I know this. Many teachers don’t know this, and maybe new school leaders, if you’re listening, make sure you’re seeking legal counsel before recommending any kind of outside services for a student.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Yeah. And from what I understand, it’s okay to say, you know, do you have a pediatrician and say, you know, here are the concerns or give them this rating scale, you can and go and talk to them about it. But pediatricians, oh my God, their plate is full. I mean, they’re dealing with everything and they don’t even have a basic course in nutrition, pediatricians. Like, I think that’s shocking to most people. They’re just starting to teach what food does to the body to doctors in modern training.

So what will a pediatrician do is their training is medication. They don’t necessarily know. What I found about physicians, and I my some of my best friends are physicians. I mean, I hang out with a lot of physicians. What I found in my personal experience, and I could say this for a lot of things, right? Teachers are seeing everything. So their knowledge is incredible, right? School leaders, they’re so incredible. But pediatricians, they want to please the parent. They’re not learning about all of these things unless they’re seeing a patient come back and getting better or they have their own personal experience. 

At any given time, about one third of all my patients were medical people from pharmacists, a lot of pharmacists, different medical doctors. I have a pediatrician right now. As I’m ending my clinical care, just ending out my last few clients. That always spoke to me, and they would always come to me and be like, why do I not know this stuff? And I’m like, you know it now. And, you know, here’s training. So your training and experience determine what you’re going to recommend. 

And so when I started, I right out of the gate had complex cases. I never saw anybody who had just simple issues and whatnot, occasionally here and there. So I realized real quick that psychiatric medication and talk therapy was not working for my clients. You know, everything from a very heavy neurodivergent population, but pretty layered mental health issues in there on top of that as well. And so I went to the microfiche in the 90s, right.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Just in case you’re too young, my leaders, it means I went to the belly of the basement and looked on film to find research. And in the first hour, I found, I learned about like vitamin D and food and the impact of these things on your brain. And I was like, holy cow. The great part is I was still in graduate school and I went to my professors and they were like, oh yeah, this stuff’s valid. And I was like, why are we not teaching a whole class on this? 

Anyway, but I always believed that every child could get better. If I had a family that was willing to do the work, right, not perfectly, but to do enough of the work, I saw that people got better. I saw that we actually created generational change. I mean, it’s pretty incredible. But we have to, when a teacher is recommending things, why can’t we give knowledge to parents and say, because the great part about nervous system information is there’s nothing judgmental. It doesn’t factor in your color. It doesn’t factor in what your life experiences are. It just says, wait, here are some behaviors that reflect under stimulation. Here are behaviors that reflect over stimulation. 

And guess what? Here are three or four or five really simple ways to regulate. And what I do in all of my work is I’m really trying to get people to commit to it. So I made it like truly stupid simple, Angela, to do this. Like, it does not matter what you’re bringing to the table. If you’re willing to take micro moments, a few minutes, multiple times throughout the day, you will experience regulation. And then to keep it going, right, I have an action plan, all these other things because what I saw is that I always quote my dad, Tony. My dad, Tony always says, it’s easy with the mouth.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: So it means we can say things, but do we actually do things? And so in this world of information overload, I mean, just absolute information overload. I love me AI, but AI is not going to cut it. You got to do. So I wanted to make it where there was no excuse. And the way I look at nervous system regulation is we need to treat this now as just like brushing our teeth. We brush our teeth to prevent cavities, abscesses, serious infections. We have to do the same thing about nervous system regulation. And, you know, the great part about nervous system regulation, again, easy, free things that you could be doing multiple times a day. 

But the more you do it, the more your nervous system will just start doing it on its own. So the more you regulate, the more your nervous system will want to regulate and do it automatically. And the reverse is, the more you dysregulate, the more your nervous system will automatically go to a dysregulated state. Now, it doesn’t matter how dysregulated you are. You can pull that back. You just have to actually believe it and you have to do some work around it. You can’t just, you know, as I always say, magic wand it.

Angela Kelly: Yes. In the classroom, there are systems we put into place. We teach kids where to put their backpacks when they come in. For the littles, it was like we teach them their name so they know which cubby is theirs, and we teach them how to get a pencil and what to do if they break a pencil and how to get a new pencil and we have all these little systems in place that make the day flow, the operation flow. We have those kinds of systems. 

And when we are doing that, it is to make the day easier for you, for me, for us, right? And this regulation can also be done as like just daily operations in your classroom. This is how it should look and feel on a regular basis. Here’s what to do when you’re dysregulated. Here’s what to do if you’re, you know, you and your friend have a conflict. You’re teaching the regulation skills just like you would teach any other system in your classroom.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Absolutely. And when you’re doing it, right, so there’s two parts to, you know, regulation and coping and managing, you know, things. When you’re regulating in moments of calm, it deepens the calm. It’s easier. It takes that stress out, and you’re creating capacity. And you need capacity for the second part of this when bad things happen, when you have a conflict with a friend, when you’re being excluded. You need to have capacity to think through, problem solve, pull out skills. 

A lot of times, you know, you’ll hear, you know, the kids that get identified, kids that get a 504, kids that get pulled for intervention. You’ll always hear the school social worker, teacher, the person doing the intervention say, well, they know it in the room, right? And they don’t know it out there. And it’s because we’re teaching skills, but we’re not teaching anybody how to regulate. So they go back into the classroom, they dysregulate, the frontal lobes go offline, and they lose the skill. You have to have that ability. 

And I think all of us could think about a time where you’re maxed out and then you’re like, oh, I just can’t do one more thing. But we are adults. Most of us say, hey, like, can we table this till tomorrow? When somebody says that, it’s because they’re done. But kids are learning and they need us to be the leaders in regulation. So if that teacher is leading the classroom, that administrator coming in and is saying, you know, like, hey, who did a love pause today? 

That’s my way of, I have this thing called the three-second love pause. And all it is give yourself three seconds. You pause, you breathe, or you do some type of regulation activity and three, then you respond. If we all took three seconds before we responded, when we’re irritated or a cup is full, we would have a lot less conflict in the world. 

Angela Kelly: Yeah. I agree.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: You know, right? But if we create this environment where this is put in, we all get a reciprocal benefit. The loudest nervous system, right, the nervous system that’s the most regulated, the most nervous system that’s the actually the one that’s the most dysregulated, they start pulling the room. But when you become that calm, this calm starts regulating the dysregulated kid without saying a word. 

And that’s where I think we need this. I really praise the boots on the ground in the classroom because they have a tremendous amount on their plate. And I don’t want to ever hear that we’re getting better at diagnosing. That is bologna and cheese. We have a lot more kids with a lot more issues, end of story. And it has nothing to do with diagnostics.

Angela Kelly: Mhm, that’s so fascinating. 

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Yeah, and I can tell you that. I mean, I’ve been there for 30 years. And you’re also seeing a lot more complexity in the issues. Since the pandemic, you know, yes, I always had complex issues, but now, since the pandemic, it’s just layer upon layer. And people really, I don’t know if some kids and some families never fully recovered from that pandemic time. And we’ve certainly gone further into device usage, which again is not the devil, but it needs moderation, it needs boundaries in advance, and nobody’s talking, I mean, I have a whole chapter on that. 

But we need to be better at helping us all manage it, including myself. I mean, I’m do things all the time to keep my device away from me because it just is too convenient. It fits in your hand and it’s just too accessible. So we have to start from within. We have to implement things that anybody can do. And that’s what things like breath work and somatics, they’re simple, small things that are absolutely part of the daily schedule. And I know teachers, I’ve been there, they’ll say, well, I already have a lot of things in my schedule. 

Well, what this is designed to do is to free up all the reminders you’re doing, constantly bringing a kid back on task, constantly managing behavior, because again, a dysregulated kid, he can look like a kid with ADHD, he can look like a kid who’s violent. It’s his nervous system’s response to stressors that might seem invisible to you.

Angela Kelly: It can also be your A plus student who’s super quiet in the back of the room but is so internally stressed and worried about like not getting the A, and they don’t speak up. They could totally be in fight or flight, but you don’t register it because it’s not a very explosive expression of dysregulation.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Yeah. I mean, those are our internalizers, right? Those are those kids that are understimulated. And those kids I see more and more because we use grades as a benchmark for mental health. And I’m not saying educators do, but I’m saying that as a society, we do say, okay, well, they’re an A student, how could they be suicidal? Or they’re an A student, how could they have severe OCD? These are real conversations that I’ve had with…

Angela Kelly: I believe you, 100%.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: And we wait for the crash and burn, and those perfectionistic kids, I really don’t believe, and trust me, I practice this. I really don’t believe every kid should be in all honors classes. It’s just not necessary. I’m sorry. It’s not. Not everybody’s going to Yale and Harvard people. And I get it if that’s your ticket out because financially a kid needs to get a scholarship. Okay, I understand. I’m not naive. But we have all kinds of kids just, oh, burning the candles at both ends. There is a physiological limit. Now, on the other hand, as somebody who constantly is doing things all day to regulate themselves, I have a capacity to actually do a lot more than another an average person. 

So not only do I handle stress well, I can handle problems right in the moment better than 90% of people I know, even my people I love. Regulating first isn’t just a concept, it’s really something that we can take action on and bring to the table. It’s not getting rid of SEL curriculum. Heck no. What I’m saying is that’s going to get absorbed. You’re going to actually get better outcomes. We get better grades. Every school has to have certain standards. And so it starts bringing equity and accessibility regardless of what kind of district you have, regardless of what your students have at home, it helps makes the curriculum much more accessible, all curriculum, not just academic.

Angela Kelly: Beautiful. I love this conversation. I just want to close out by reminding everybody that when you regulate your nervous system, you actually create more bandwidth. So for us busy school leaders whose plates are full and overflowing, when you learn to self-regulate, you actually expand your capacity to do more because you’re able to regulate and keep going. Same will be true for teachers and same will be true for students. 

So this work, this self-regulation, learning these skills, having teachers teach this in their classrooms, and then teaching students how to do it, that is going to expand your entire, you know, school’s capacity to, I want to say more productive, but not in a way that’s from stress and pressure and force, it’s from a capacity building standpoint. Would you say?

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Yeah, oh, absolutely. You’re just going to have more capacity for so many things in your life, having patience for others, grace for yourself, because I think we’re all so overloaded. Teachers are predominantly women. Women have a lot on their shoulders. I’m not saying dads don’t either. My husband’s amazing. But we are now just so maxed out. 

And I think we think that, what I want to say is little micro moments are like putting money in your 401k, and it starts building and building and building, and we have to do this. You can’t just wait for the running on the weekend or a massage every two weeks. That’s not cutting it. You need to start bringing this into your daily life multiple times a day, and it’s easy, easy, easy, easy. This is not going to be something that’s riding on your shoulders. You’re going to start doing it automatically because it just creates capacity on a personal and professional level. Educators will be better human beings.

Angela Kelly: Wonderful. What a great way to kick off this new school year. Rosanne, thank you for your time. Thank you for being on this podcast. I’m so happy to see you. I’m so glad to hear you’re doing well and the book is now launching and I want to get this into the hands of all school leaders. I think it’s so important. I teach it at the school leadership level. You’re teaching it at the parental and, you know, teacher level, student level, and just thank you for being so willing to share your expertise, your wisdom, and knowledge with us today.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Well, thank you for this conversation.

Angela Kelly: It’s been so fun. Let’s do it again.

Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge: Absolutely.

Angela Kelly: All right, take care. That’s it, folks. We’ve got to wrap up. She’s got another appointment and I’ve got to run. So have a beautiful week. Please let us know how this impacted you, how it inspired you, and how it’s setting you up for success in your upcoming school year. Have a wonderful week. Talk to you soon. Take care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 447. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Well, hello my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. And hey, if you’re a brand new school leader and you’re just now learning about The Empowered Principal® Podcast, we welcome you. I’m so happy you are here. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, your strength, your gifts with your school, your colleagues, your students, the world. It is such a delight to meet you here through the podcast. So, definitely shout out, say hello, come say hello on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever you find yourself hanging out with fellow school leaders. We would love to have you a member of our empowered principal community. So welcome.

Today, I’m going to drop the secrets of successful school leadership and successful school leaders. These secrets were inspired by my own failures. Everything that I’ve done wrong as a school leader and the insights, the experience, the wisdom, the knowledge that I have gained in my own mistakes, my own coaching while I was a principal, I had a coach, a life coach, but life and leadership go hand in hand, and in my experience and in my learning over the last decade as a coach helping other school leaders become very successful.

And I thought, I’m going to write these out in terms of how I experience them and things I’ve observed and things I’ve read, things I’ve experienced. And I’m saying them straight away. And I want to preface these secrets in that some will really resonate with you. Others won’t. That’s okay. These are just my personal experiences, what I have learned, what I believe to be true, and what I’ve observed in other people. So some will hit, some will land, some won’t. That’s okay.

Some of them, they will feel very aligned. You’ll be like, yes, that’s so true. I believe that. And others will trigger you. They will awaken you. They will jolt you. You’ll have a little identity shake for a minute. That’s okay. They’re not intended to make you feel any kind of pain. They’re intended to create awareness and to create alignment and to just awaken you and engage you in who you want to be, how you want to feel, and the approach you would desire to take in leadership. That’s simply what these are.

These are the secrets I have found. I would love to hear what you think when you listen to this podcast. So, if you would so delight me in sharing your thoughts, your questions in either the Facebook group or you can message me personally on Facebook or Instagram. I do hang out on LinkedIn every now and then, but primarily Facebook and Instagram. And tell me what you think, because they’re here to support, to empower, to help you, okay? All right. I’m just going to read them as I wrote them, and I will leave it at that.

Successful school leaders believe that they have power and agency, regardless of their title, position, or status. They believe that they always contain personal power, personal agency.

Struggling leaders, on the other hand, believe that other people, situations, circumstances, things outside of their being have power over them and that they lack personal agency.

Successful leaders focus on their successes. They think about them, they study them, they celebrate them, they acknowledge them.

Struggling leaders tend to focus on their failures, the disappointments, the not reaching the goals, the disappointments, the rejections, all of the things that didn’t go right. That’s where they’re spending their time, their energy, their attention, and their focus.

Successful leaders are committed to empowerment. They’re dedicated to it. They’re convicted to experiencing and expanding their personal power.

Struggling leaders are very committed to comfort. They don’t want to go out of their comfort zone. They like to stay in what they know.

Successful leaders stay connected to their vision and allow the vision to grow bigger and to be bigger than they think they can even achieve. They let it go big.

Struggling leaders tend to dim their vision when challenges arise. They don’t want to dream big because they don’t want to be disappointed. They want to be there, not here. And they feel like they’re chasing the end of a rainbow. And when challenges arise, they dim. They go small. Successful leaders play big. Struggling leaders play small.

Successful leaders frame obstacles as opportunities for improvement. They look at it as an awareness tool to say, oh, I didn’t realize this was a problem, but now that it is, let’s create a solution. Let’s create an answer. Let’s improve this.

Struggling leaders frame obstacles as reasons why things can’t improve. It’s either themselves, the obstacle itself, other people. That’s the reason. That’s the excuse as to why we can’t improve, that things will never change.

Successful leaders collaborate and seek to engage with like-minded leaders. They connect with fellow leaders who are positive and empowered. They want to connect with people of the same mindset.

Struggling leaders will isolate and hide for the fear that they’ll be seen as incompetent, ineffective, or incapable. And they want to protect and hide themselves, so they will self-isolate, and then they say that they feel lonely in the job. But successful leaders don’t feel lonely. They’re out there engaging and collaborating and having conversations and joining groups and going to conferences and calling their friends and colleagues.

Successful leaders believe they can handle whatever comes their way and that their ability to problem solve is greater than the problem itself.

Struggling leaders believe that the problem is greater or bigger than their capacity to handle whatever comes their way.

Successful leaders give feedback and are equally willing to receive it.

Struggling leaders fear giving feedback and they fear receiving feedback. They fear feedback because they label it as insufficient. If you’re getting feedback, you’re insufficient. If you’re giving it but you’re insufficient, then you’re an imposter. There is a relationship with feedback that determines success and struggling leaders.

Successful school leaders trust that they are equipped with the resources they need, and they leverage those resources, the ones that they actually have.

Struggling leaders will lack trust in themselves and in the resources available to them. They think that something outside of themselves or outside of what they already have available to them is the answer. This leaves struggling leaders chasing, always chasing external answers, the next shiny object, the next prize, the next solution. They think that it’s outside of them. They don’t understand that the solution is within.

Successful leaders trust in the ever abundance of time.

Struggling leaders focus on a lack of time.

Successful school leaders plan and prepare, and then they allow for that plan and all those preparations to go right out the window. They plan and prepare, but then they detach from the plan, trusting that what does come up is now the new plan.

Struggling leaders will plan, prepare, and then attach to the plan and become very frustrated when the plan changes, and then give up on planning and preparing because what’s the point? And then they are underprepared.

Successful leaders empower their teams to work for the greater good. They will onboard, train, and delegate.

Struggling leaders disempower themselves and other people by trying to do it all, know it all, be it all, and control it all. Onboarding plus delegation equals success.

Successful leaders manage their emotions and their minds very well.

Struggling leaders allow their emotions and their mind to manage them.

Successful leaders understand that fear is just a normal part of the leadership emotional experience. They allow it to be present, and they move forward anyway.

Struggling leaders will interpret fear as something’s gone wrong, and I need to steer away from this, to avoid the actions that bring up fear.

Successful leaders embody lifelong learning. They embrace being new, and they value personal and professional development and evolution.

Struggling leaders will prioritize comfort, ease, and the familiar.

I’m going to leave it here and allow you to ponder. And I know some of these may feel triggering for you, but let them in a good way, a very healthy way. Notice, did any of these feel offensive or anger you in any way? If so, why? What comes up for you? Is it defensiveness? Do you feel the desire to try and justify yourself or explain it away or reject it all together to argue it, to avoid it, to ignore it? 

Because remember, all of these came from things that I have done. I have pretended to know. I have had a lack of time. I’ve had a lot of scarcity around resources. I’ve believed that the solution was out of me. I didn’t think I was capable enough. I’ve had all the thoughts, and they lead to inaction or small action, less impactful action.

You can see these secrets as opportunities for awareness, alignment, momentum, and growth. And as I’ve said, I have been on the struggling side of each of these, personally. And I have also been able to embrace the successful mindset. And not in a way that I’ve arrived and I’m never going to struggle again, but really as just an awareness tool, like, oh, I recognize this pattern of thinking. I’ve done this before. I’ve seen this before. I’m aware again. Now that I’m aware, I can redirect, reframe, realign, and get back into momentum.

Because this list, and it’s just a list, there’s a million more truths out there in terms of leadership secrets, but these are for me personally, they allow me to adjust and to focus on successful trains of thought. And at the end of the day, this list of secrets is really nothing more than just at least for me, truths that I have observed in both myself and in the hundreds of people I’ve worked with over the course of my career. 

And now, they’re no longer secrets. I’ve given them to you. They’re opportunities, and they are available to you. So listen to this, print out the transcript, read it over, notice which ones align, which ones feel a little crunchy, and work with them. See if you can get into alignment with them. See if they work for you. And if they don’t, drop them. They’re not etched in stone. They’re just my personal experience.

But if this really resonates with you, if it ignites you and excites you, then the Empowered Principal programs were designed exactly for someone like you, a school leader like you, whether you join the Empowered Principal Collaborative, which is a group coaching program, or you decide to jump into EPA, which is a deep dive intensive instructional coaching and mentoring program, or if you’re personally drawn to one-on-one coaching, which is very private, customized, and personalized to your specific experiences, whichever way you’re leaning, these programs were designed for you. Have a beautiful week. I love you all. Take good care, and we’ll talk next week. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 445.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly.

Hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the podcast. I am in such empowered energy. I feel new beginnings coming for all of us. I recently recorded a Facebook Live in the Empowered Principal Facebook group. So for those of you who haven’t yet joined us, please join us. We would love to have you in there. We are in the middle of the Summer of Fun challenge, and we are having fun. I hope that you will join us because when you join us, when you comment, when you post, when you like, you’re entered into a drawing to win $1,111 worth of Empowered Principal credits towards any of my coaching programs.

And I’m going to be talking more about the coaching programs for the upcoming school year because July is the new beginning. It’s the new month of the new contract. It’s the new energy of a new school year. We are planning, we are preparing for great things to happen. And what I love about new beginning energy is that anything is possible. It’s a fresh start. It is a clean slate. So, let’s talk about new beginnings, and then I’m going to tell you all about the upcoming programs for the 2026-27 school year. All right.

New beginnings, what are they? When I think about a new beginning, a new beginning is starts with a thought. It starts with a desire. We desire to experience something new. We desire to try something new, to start something new, to learn something new, to experience something new. It starts with a desire. And it also starts with a belief that we are capable of having or trying or experiencing the new thing, that we are capable of learning, that we are capable of having, that we are capable of experiencing, that we are capable of accomplishing it. We have a desire. The desire is the hunger, the drive, the energy, the fuel, the emotions behind it.

So when you think about new beginnings for you, the first year you ever taught was a new beginning. That was a first year. You had dreams, you had visions of what teaching would look like and feel like. You dreamed the experience. You had a desire to educate, to connect with kids, to make an impact on their lives and in the greater world. And then you get into that first year, and it isn’t exactly what you envisioned, right? It’s new. It’s uncharted territory. It’s trailblazing. It’s the first time you’ve ever done something.

And then at the end of that first year, you have thoughts and feelings and opinions about the year, about that first year. And what happens with a new beginning is we go through the new beginning, it’s all uncharted, we don’t know what we don’t know until we experience it. We have ups, we have downs, we have wins, we have fails, we have great days, we have terrible days. We shed tears of joy, tears of sadness and grief and pain and regrets or reflection. And at the end of that new beginning, what we do is we’re like, okay, I don’t want to experience the pain points of that new beginning, so I’m going to brace myself for the next year upcoming. I’m going to think about all the things that didn’t work and I’m going to fix them so I don’t have to experience that again. But I’m going to bring this year with me into year two.

But what we do if we’re not careful is we bring everything with us, the good, bad, and the ugly. So we bring the wisdom. Here’s what I learned about classroom management. I’m going to change these things this year. This is the wisdom I’ve gained from my new beginning. But I didn’t like this, so I’m going to brace for that. I’m going to try to prepare because I expect that bad things could happen and I don’t want bad things to happen.

So new beginnings are that fresh start. I want to offer something about new beginnings. We actually desire new beginnings. We don’t want to experience the same year over and over and over. So for those of you who are brand new, coming into school leadership, you are already perfectly aligned with the new leadership energy. You’re already in it. You don’t have to think about it or to align yourself. You’re right there. So stay with me here.

And for those of you who are veterans, this is especially important for you to consider. When we are veterans, it can be easy to go on autopilot. It’s like learning to drive. In the beginning, you are very aware of all the gadgets, all the lights, all the sounds, all the buzzing, all the cars around you, very, very hyper-aware because we want to do it right, we want to be careful, we don’t know what we’re doing. We turn the radio off, we are focusing, concentrating. It’s brand new. But after a few years, we just get in and we’re on autopilot and sometimes we don’t even remember actually driving because our thoughts were elsewhere. But it’s rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

The same thing can be true for the school year. It’s like, well, last year sucked, so this year’s probably going to suck, so I probably should prepare to brace myself or try to avoid as much suckiness as possible, right? We anticipate the pain points. We anticipate what could go wrong, and then we end up preparing ourselves for the worst-case scenario while not really anticipating the best-case scenario. We’re thinking like, oh gosh, this group of students, this staff, this community, this group of parents, they’re really tough, so next year’s going to be tough as well versus I extract what I learned from last year. I glean the wisdom like I scrape the wisdom off the top, but I release the rest. I honor the pain, I honor the learning points, I celebrate the wins, I celebrate the good in all of last year, but I release it.

If we can go into the new school year as an actual new school year with a brand new fresh lens, imagine going into your school and meeting your teachers again for the first time, meeting families and students again for the first time, being on that campus again for the first time, looking around, noticing the little things, being the first-day driver, being in that seat where you’re looking around, noticing such awareness, such deep awareness of every little detail. Because here’s the truth, your students coming in are not the same students they were at the beginning of last year. They’re different humans. They’re different little people. Your staff, they are not the same staff that you had last year. They have changed, they have grown, they are different people.

Just as you, over the summer, have grown, have evolved. You might not think so, but you have, whether that’s you’ve gotten physical rest, you’ve spent time with your family and friends, you’ve filled that emotional bucket, you’ve had a lot of fun in the Summer of Fun challenge, you’ve gone on your trips, you’ve been to leadership retreats, you’ve done strategic planning with your community and your stakeholders, whatever it is that you have done in the last month, six weeks, eight weeks, you have evolved, you’ve changed.

So nobody coming into your school is the same human, and yet we label people based on the past all of the time. We label ourselves based on the past all of the time versus looking through the lens of a new beginning, a fresh start, truly a fresh start. Because the truth is every single minute of every single day is a fresh start, a fresh opportunity. And our experience as school leaders, our experience as students and staff and families, community, the experience that we have is based on how we’re thinking, what we’re focusing on. Are we focusing on the past? Are we making assumptions about the past? Or are we putting on a new lens and looking through the lens of fresh starts, new beginnings?

I’m telling you, school leaders out there, you have the opportunity in your hands to create an entirely different experience this year simply by going into your mind and into your heart and allowing things to be brand new, looking through the lens of newness, fresh starts, not labeling kids, trusting that they have changed and evolved, treating them with empowerment, treating them with respect in the sense of honoring who they’ve become, giving them a fresh start, a clean slate.

You know when you make a mistake with a friend or a partner or a colleague and you feel terrible about it and you’ve apologized, you’ve made it right, you’ve tried to repair and move forward, and you’re telling yourself and telling them, “I’m going to be better, do better.” You want to be forgiven. You want a clean slate. You want people to not continue to label you for that thing that you did back in last October. You want a clean slate. Our kids want that too. Our teachers want that too.

And so if you’re having a hard time giving people new beginnings, why is that? That’s the internal work. What is the fear? Usually, in my work with clients, the fear is they’ll do it to me again. Shame on me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, right? And we are afraid to trust. We’re afraid to think of people with a clean slate to remove the labels because what happens if they do it again?

So let’s go down the path. Let’s say you come in with the old lens on, the lens of last year, the lens of, new school year, same stuff, same people, same game, same cast of characters here. So you’re going to come in with predetermined expectations of who’s going to behave well, who’s not going to behave well, who’s going to achieve, who’s not going to achieve, who’s going to be in an intervention, who’s not going to be in an intervention, what teachers are going to do well, what grade levels are going to do well, what departments are going to do well. We already kind of come in with the script already written for the school year. And that script will play out if this is what you believe will happen, because what you believe will happen is what will happen.

So this work is about playing a new game, a new beginning. What if we wrote a new script? What if we tried something different? And you can play around this summer right now. You can try a new food, you can try a new way to work, try a new coffee shop, try a new department store, try a new grocery store, whatever. Try something new just to get comfortable and normalize trying new things, new beginnings, fresh starts. Start a new morning routine. If you love your morning routine, start a new evening routine. Pick a routine you’d like to try something new at and just try it because what we do in school is we brace ourselves for what we think already is. We already have decided what it will be and then it plays out that way.

You don’t want the school year to look like last year. And even if you had an amazing school year, you want this year to be a different kind of amazing, with new heights, new achievements, new accomplishments, new connections, new collaborations. You still want new, even when it’s good. We try to avoid change when things are good, and we desperately beg for change when things are bad, yet we don’t really believe they’ll turn around for us.

If there’s one thing, one gift I could leave in the world of education, it is the understanding that our thoughts are energy. Our emotions are fuel, energetic fuel for our actions. So our thoughts are energy that trigger emotional energy, that trigger actionable energy, that trigger outcomes and results. If we could see that what we believe is what we create, is the outcomes we create, if we could really harness that, you would have a new beginning every day, every week, every month, every season, every year. You would look through the lens like a child looks through the lens. Every Christmas is the best Christmas. Every birthday, they’re excited. Every school year, right? Until they also start to realize same year, same school, it’s going to just be the same thing over and over. “I didn’t like school last year. I’m not going to like school this year.” They too get into that kind of vortex of negativity, of stagnancy.

So why don’t we do this? Why don’t we simply decide that we are going to look through the lens of new beginnings? This is a new beginning. This can be an entirely different school year, whether you are technically brand new in the job or whether you’ve been doing this for 20 years. Look through the lens of brand new, different. What is it you want to see? Pretend you’re putting on brand new glasses for the first time and you’re looking through your campus, you’re meeting people. Can you imagine going up to the person that you struggled with last year and being genuinely happy to see them, shaking their hand, looking forward to working with them because you know that they’ve gone through change? And your energy and you believing in them will be reflected back to you. And because people have free will, even when people, when they human, and they make mistakes or they behave in old patterns, you can know that people will still behave in old patterns, and you can still respond differently. You can change and make it new by changing the way you respond even when they respond the same way. That’s how you create new.

So, yes, people have free will to behave how they want. We don’t control their behavior, but your energy coming in, assuming positive intention, assuming professional and personal growth, assuming evolution, evolvement, assuming desire in them, you can meet them and they can meet you however they’re going to meet you, but the way that you interact, the way you set your intentions, the way you project your energy, that’s the new thing. And that’s what we’re doing in the world of the Empowered Principal. That’s what this podcast is about. That’s what the Facebook group is about. That’s what my programming is all about, my paid programming.

So if you desire to see through a new lens, to experience school leadership in an entirely different way, to feel the excitement and engagement of being new, anticipating great things, preparing, expecting that great things will come. You know how you go on vacation? The anticipation is half the fun. When you’re shopping and you’re packing, you’re anticipating a good outcome, a positive experience. You’re expecting great things, great memories. Very few people plan a vacation so that they can doom and gloom and anticipate everything going wrong. I’m sure there’s people out there who do that, but most of us, the reason we go on vacation, we are preparing to receive a positive experience. I want us to do that with our school year.

We’re going to pack and prepare and plan as though everything’s going to be amazing, even though we know it might rain a couple of days on our vacation, or even when a suitcase goes missing and shows up a week late, there will be hiccups in our vacation, but we’re focused on the great things. We’re preparing and expecting for an amazing school year. We’re packing for it, we’re planning for it, we’re preparing for it, we’re onboarding for it, we’re showing up in the anticipation of amazing accomplishments, amazing connections, amazing collaborations. We are expecting it. That’s what new beginnings is about.

So, for this coming year, there are some new beginnings in the world of the Empowered Principal. Are you ready for it? Okay. I have three offers for this coming year. Offer number one is my standard, classic one-on-one coaching. This is where I started. It’s the foundation of my work. For the first few years of my business, I only coached one-on-one. I started with one client, and then two, and then I had four, and then I had six, and then it was 10, and then it got up to 24. I had 24 one-on-one clients, which I was bursting at the seams because I was coaching for an hour per client plus extra bonus calls as they needed them.

So I was coaching over 24 hours a week plus all of the back-end work. That’s when I decided to launch EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative. It’s a group mastermind. It’s a group coaching program for people who love to connect, who love to collaborate, who love to be around like-minded people. It’s a more mastermind experience. It’s a weekly group coaching program. We meet via Zoom. It’s once a week, but the beautiful thing about EPC is that it’s a collaborative. You are hearing other people’s wins, fails, successes, trials, challenges, and they’re getting coached on it, which coaches you. You feel not alone in this group. Other people are going through some of the similar things that you’re going through. It’s synergy. I think it’s one of the most empowering ways to learn and to be coached.

One-on-one is excellent for very high-level coaching, and it’s excellent for beginning coaching. It kind of hits on the ends. If you need confidential, private coaching because you’re going through something very sensitive in nature and you need to discuss things, but you can’t discuss them publicly or in a group, one-on-one is perfect. EPC, the collaborative, is for masterminding, working together, synergy. It’s for momentum, making motion, and to have fun along the way. We have a lot of fun. We laugh, we cry, we do all the things. But this is a group where you get to talk about the real emotional experience, the real experience of school leadership. That’s EPC. It’s a mastermind collaborative.

And the new and upcoming, I’m so excited, the new and upcoming program, this is brand new, new beginnings, fresh starts, is the Empowered Principal Academy. Now, listen up. This is the first week of July. The Empowered Principal Academy is starting in two weeks. This is not a program that you’re going to sit on and think about and wonder if you should or shouldn’t. You either are going to do it this year or you’re going to wait until next year. The Empowered Principal Academy was developed to help school leaders like yourself bring out the best in those you lead. The art and science of coaching is the practice of embracing empowerment for you as a coach, as a mentor, as a leader. Those are three different roles that you play. I’m teaching the art and the science of coaching to bring your people up, to empower them.

I want you to imagine each member of your staff and student community fully embodying their own empowerment because coaching at its soul, at its heart is the beauty of evolution and creation. It is a gift that you give to your staff of expansion, where you have the opportunity to provide others the experience of expanding and evolving and developing and creating their new beginnings, their new opportunities. You want your teachers to expand and grow. You want them to be continually evolving who they are, what they do, how they do it, what they believe, what they accomplish, the lives that they touch, because coaching is opportunity for us, for them, for the greater good. It’s about our identity evolving as a leader and adding the mastery of coaching into our identity. It’s about providing opportunity and identity expansion for our staff and our students because we want them to own their own empowerment. Mastering the art of coaching is going to develop you as a master at school leadership.

And I have been coaching for a decade. It is time that I share the tools, the tips, the strategies, the questions, the communication, the conversations, the how of coaching. And the Empowered Principal Academy is going to offer you just that. We’re starting mid-July. You’re going to learn, there’s going to be several sessions where you learn by firehose, and then there will be a monthly meeting. We will focus on a particular aspect of coaching. We will be integrating that particular aspect of coaching into our work that month, and you will be connecting with me and receiving feedback and being able to ask questions so that by the end of the year, you will graduate with a certificate in the art of coaching through the Empowered Principal Academy.

So here are the details. For one-on-one coaching, there is a link in the show notes for an individual consult. You and I will jump on the phone for about 45 minutes to an hour. You’re going to tell me everything that you think I need to know so that I can help you at an individual level and expedite your situation, expedite your coaching, expedite your leadership. If you’re considering the Empowered Principal Collaborative, there is a registration link in the show notes for EPC. If you are interested in the Empowered Principal Academy, there are two ways that you can connect with the academy.

Number one, if you have more questions or you want to talk with me directly, there is a link for a 20-minute meet and greet session. We can Q&A, we can talk about all the things. I can get you the information you need. You can schedule that. The link is in the show notes to schedule a short Q&A conversation with me over the phone. If you’re ready to sign up for EPA, there is a registration link in the show notes. Every link that you need is in the show notes. Simply click on the link, you will get more information from that link, and there’s also the link to schedule a personal phone call with me. I will answer any questions you have. I’ll take the time you need for you to explore what option you feel is best for you.

I personally believe with all of my heart, this is the most impactful professional development you could ever engage with because it’s not a one-and-done. It’s not about platforms and curriculums and what you should be doing that you’re not or what you should stop doing that feels essential. It’s about energy, leadership wealth, leadership energetics. It’s about you, developing you so that you can develop them so that you can develop the world for the greater good.

This is unlike any other leadership experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve developed it through my own work, my own study of humans, of communication, of my thoughts and feelings, of life coaching, of leadership coaching, and I’ve combined it into one package for you. That’s what the podcast is for and all of my paid programming is all about. You will come out of these programs, regardless of which one you choose, a different person, new beginnings, all of the time. You’re ever-evolving, you’re ever-growing, and these programs simply help guide you, help strengthen you, help you see what’s already there within you. You have what it takes. Your empowerment is there, accessible, ready to go.

Let’s have the most beautiful new beginning of the 2026-27 school year. I can’t wait to meet you and work with you. Have the most beautiful, beautiful week. I’ll talk with you soon.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.